(Vox) – Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt doesn’t hide his contempt for how the agency has been run, but he does profess to care about one of its key programs: Superfund, which oversees the cleanup of the nation’s worst toxic waste sites. In April, he toured a site in East Chicago, Indiana, contaminated with lead and arsenic, and told residents, “We are going to get this right.”

The following month, Pruitt — Oklahoma’s attorney general before he joined the EPA — tapped one of his former donors, banker Albert “Kell” Kelly, to find ways to accelerate and improve Superfund cleanups. Kelly started by consulting career staff members — often knowledgeable officials who work at the agency regardless of who holds the White House. But then Kelly closed off the process, conferring with Pruitt to produce a final plan that altered or excluded many of the staffers’ suggestions. Gone, for example, was the idea that EPA officials be identified early on to lead discussions with communities on how contaminated land should be used after cleanup.

“We’re missing a huge opportunity to do something new and different with Superfund,” said one of two EPA employees who described the process to the Center for Public Integrity on the condition of anonymity.

What happened with Superfund is hardly an anomaly. Today’s EPA is wracked with internal conflict and industry influence and is struggling to fulfill its mission, according to more than two dozen current and former agency employees.

A few dozen political appointees brought in under the Trump administration are driving policy. At least 16 of the 45 appointees worked for industries such as oil, coal and chemicals, as this CIP graphic shows.

Four of these people — and another 21 — worked for, or donated to, politicians who have questioned established climate science, such as Pruitt and Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK).

Career staff members — lawyers, scientists, analysts — are largely being frozen out of decision-making, current and former agency employees say. These staffers rarely get face time with Pruitt and frequently receive top-down orders from political appointees with little room for debate. They must sometimes force their way into conversations about subjects in which they have expertise. [more]